The Perception System of Soccer Playing Robots Helps Students to Understand Human Perception

To perceive the world is a difficult task. This is equally true for robots and humans. Soccer playing robots need to perceive the world in a specific way to be able to shoot goals. Software engineers need to perceive the needs of customers to be able to create easy to use interfaces. The perception system of soccer playing robots does produce strange behavior if unexpected objects are found on the playing field. If an unexpected red object is encountered it will be misinterpreted as ball. Similarly humans often misinterpret information they do not expect. For teaching purposes the simple mechanism of the robots helps students to understand how misinterpretation in the human perception system occurs and how they can be avoided.